Show Em Your Guns!

Posted on April 10, 2009

Some people have been asking me how I achieved this shot, which was taken last weekend during a client session. Essentially this is just a simple case of using off-camera flash and exposing for the subject, in this case Scott and his son, and then underexposing for the sky by a stop or two in order to capture the sunset. Since we were on a time crunch we shot fast as the sun went down and then moved on to a new location. Later when I loaded the image on my screen I noticed the sunset was not as rich as I wanted so it was time for some post-processing magic!

There are a couple of ways to achieve the end result, but the easiest method was just a case of knocking the exposure down a bit more than what was shot in camera and outputting multiple images, each with a different exposure setting. This is why you should always shoot in RAW format because exposure adjustment is one of the things that is simple to do in post-production. With the different exposed images I was able to then combine them all together using a tool called PhotoMatix, the end result a correctly exposed subject and sky.